Waste management has become one of the most important problems facing today's society The problem of disposing of scrap or junk automobiles continues to be of critical concern. Since 1982, well in excess of 10,000,000 passenger cars, trucks and buses have been sold in the United States and Canada in an average per year.
Originally, old or non-usable automobiles simply were carted off to "junk yards" where attempts were made to salvage various usable components of the vehicle. Such facilities became such blots on the environment that automobile crushing machines were designed to compact an automobile in order to recycle its considerable metal composition. Before crushing, the automobiles often were burned to dispose of as much of the non-metallic components thereof as possible. However, this process resulted in considerable pollution of the air.
Consequently, automobile shredders were designed which mechanically tear the automobiles apart and separate them into two products, metallic auto scrap and residue. Usually, the motors, batteries and catalytic converters are removed before shredding. The metallic scrap is shipped to mills for remelting and the residue material usually was shipped off to a dump. However, these early systems became less and less efficient because of increasing energy considerations which required lighter vehicles to conserve fuel. This, in turn, resulted in automobiles being designed to reduce the amount of metal components and considerably increase the amount of non-metal or non-ferrous components. As a result, the amount of residue being dumped (versus the amount of meltable metal) became enormous and salvaging automobiles became considerably less profitable.
Automobile residue separation systems then were incorporated in recycling facilities. In some systems, what has been termed "fluff" in the industry has been air separated from the remaining metal in the residue product, resulting in recovering approximately 70-80% of the residue metals. The "fluff" again simply was dumped. Other systems, sometimes called heavy media separators, take the waste fluff, copper, aluminum, die cast metal and stainless steel and separate the material with a magnetic media of a specific gravity and which is controlled to first "float" the waste at a specific gravity of 1.5 or under and then float the waste at a specific gravity of 2.7-3.2 for floating aluminas. The remainder of the metals simply are hand picked. This latter system may recover as much as 95% of the residue material, by weight, but the 5% fluff is considerable by volume when considering the number of automobiles that must be disposed of each year.
This invention is directed to a method of recycling automobile waste residue wherein even the fluff material can be processed into a useful product. The fluff material itself consists of such automobile waste material components as cotton, rubber, mixed plastics, some glass and possible up to 5% metals.